The Minutes Past Midnight
by Mystic25
Summary: There is an aftermath to every type of war, and there are the friends you go through it with. Tag to end of DH2.


"The Minutes Past Midnight."

Mystic25

Summary: There is an aftermath to every type of war, and there are the friends you go through it with. Tag to end of DH2.

Rating: T for some imagery.

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns this brillant world with characters I will never forget. I steal out of love.

A/N: This has bits of H/Hr, but a back drop of friendships with all three. You may consider it AU, if you do I don't care, I just care that you read it.

A/N #2: The title is an reference to the song "Two Minutes to Midnight" by: Iron Maiden.

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"_One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human." _

~George Santayana

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The Weasley house is home when home seems like a flickering light too far off in the distance to reach. It is warm when the cold wants to come through the cracks and bury itself into your bones. It is someplace to awaken to when you awaken screaming, hot and flushed with a face full of nightmares of killing Voldemort, but hearing the thousands of screams of those who died before his final scream.

Ron's little attic room is warm, stuffy, choking to the boy, barely transformed man, who sleeps in the bed that he has outgrown, because it is too narrow for his tossing body. But months on the run, sleeping on a cot in a shabby smelling tent made him take back this too small bed, because it was a _bed_, and he never realized how much he had missed such a simple thing until he didn't have it anymore.

The sheets were soft, the comforter smelled familiar, the hooting of Ron's old tiny owl – all there, all comforting senses.

But, they were screaming again.

All of them.

Especially the youngest ones, the kids who had just started, barely fitting into shiny new robes, now dripping blood down their fabric as werewolf claws tore into them, and spells they hadn't even learned the names of were fired on them, ending their screaming with a life taking silence.

Harry's glasses were on the little nightstand beside him. He fumbled for them in the darkness, but then stopped, pulling down comforter, that was no longer familiar, but suffocating.

Harry fought to breathe normally.

Voldemort was dead, he chanted this litany to himself. He was gone.

But, not the nightmares.

They lived on.

Battle scars.

War wounds.

They haunted him.

All those screams.

"Mate?"

Ron was awake, blinking at him in a barely there light, his face a halo of red hair. The springs of his mattress creaked as he sat up. "You alright Harry?"

Ron knows the answer without Harry having to say anything. Winning a war leaves as many scars as losing one.

Harry blinks, and scrubs at his eyes, wiping off droplets of sweat that have accumulated there, at least he tells himself that. He doesn't want to think about what other kinds of things they were, because it was too much.

"I'm fine," Harry has said this for 9 years. He was good at this particular lie. It soothed, it ended questions, it left him to himself, to try and bury things that hurt too much to be let out to breathe.

Ron pushes his blanket down from where it's bunched up in a clinging mass to his body. He doesn't believe him. And it doesn't make him angry; it makes him feel something entirely different.

The room has no light, but Harry can _feel_ Ron watching him. And it is an unsettling thing, because many of the screams he hears are _Ron's_, crying over the dead body of his brother, flinging himself down to Fred's still form while their mother stroked the hairs of both her son's, the one who was gone and the one who wept for him.

Harry swallows something that wants to become nausea, a bile that he feels creeping up his throat. "Really Ron, it's nothing." Harry says to the darkness where he feels Ron's watching the most. Without the light all he sees are his dreams, Fred's body, Ron cries, George cries, there is such a sorrow there it's crushing.

There is a pushing back of a blanket, a match is struck, it fizzles and a lamp is light, the oil turned up and an illumination casts Ron's face into a half light.

The lamp moves with Ron as he holds it in his hand, stepping off the island of his bed to stand on the floorboards.

Harry watches him move with the lamplight, stepping in bare feet to the door. "What are you doing?" Harry's heartbeat is frantic. Voldemort is gone, he should sleep easier, nothing was chasing him anymore. But his still afraid.

Afraid that if he loses sight of his friends, something will happen, they will be taken from him. They will go into the darkness and never come back.

Ron disappears into the blackness outside his door, lighting it with his lamp. It bends round the darkness, and then fades away entirely.

Harry's heart rate doubles. He waits, fighting the urge to spring after him by gripping at his sheets. Minutes pass, Harry's fingers are going numb from his grasping. He hears his breathing as something heavy and rasping in his ears.

The light comes back, it starts off small, but grows steadily larger as the lamp comes closer.

Ron is back.

Harry breathes out, trying to calm his racing heart back into a normal mode.

It was stupid to feel this way.

But he couldn't help it. He had killed the most evil thing of his time, of _anyone's_ time, it had stolen half his life, taken countless friends from him. It wasn't that couldn't _stop_ feeling like this; it was that he didn't know _how._

Someone is behind Ron, someone he is grasping hands with. The door pushes open with that second person's hand. Brown eyes open, wide, searching.

She makes her way over to Harry, allowing Ron to lead the way for a moment, before releasing his hand and continuing the journey unaided.

Harry sees her standing there. Dressed in soft flannel and a white shirt, a falling of thick hair, brushed in disarray, her eyes absorbing the light of the lamp.

"It's just a bad dream Hermione," Harry says this a reassurance. He blinks, and when his eyes meet hers again, they are sad.

Her fingers find his hair, and she cards them through it, sweeping a caress across his brow with her thumb.

His eyes have closed at her touch, and they reopen again to the pressing of a soft kiss to his brow.

"I know." Her smile is sad too, and she sighs like she might break for a moment. She hears the screams too, she smells the blood, sees the fire when she closes her eyes. Sees Harry dead at Voldemort's feet.

She looks to Ron, and she knows he sees it too, hears it too.

Ron doesn't hear it the same way she does, or Harry does, but they _all_ hear it, all see it, it is all connected into one shared groupings of moments in their lives that have dug wounds as deep as trenches into their skins. It is still so fresh that it bleeds. And it torments them.

Yes, they have won.

But, here in the darkness of those hours before dawn arose, they can hear just how much wining has cost them.

"Go back to sleep mate," Ron rests a hand on Harry's shoulder, and Harry blinks at it, and something in him wants to open wide at the touch of his friend, but he blinks it back down. Because if started, it may never stop, and he is so tired.

Ron's words are to Harry, but his eyes find Hermione's as well, when he speaks them.

They started this together, and that is how they will continue it. Especially in the moments that existed like this. In little attic rooms, where they shared whispered secrets as children; where they sit now, each at 17-years-old, hugging to the ache in their bones, trying to remember those long ago voices.

Harry is the first to lie back onto his bed.

Hermione does not look at him, but climbs up onto it to lie down beside him, as if she has done this a million times. He pulls the blanket up over them both, inviting her to stay with that one simple gesture. His arm goes about hers, one of his hands finding hers, and he at her front, breath warm on her neck.

Ron is in his bed on his side, facing them. The lamplight still flickers, casting their faces in shadows.

They watch each other. Haunted by nightmares, by memories.

Fred's laughter echoes in Ron's ears, he blinks the fogging of tears that mist his eyes, rolling his eyes upwards to keep them from falling. Fred's laughter is so light, and fun, and it hurts, right above his heart.

Ron's stops his tears just as Hermione's fall. Two silent ones, traveling slowly downwards, hitting her hands and Harry's.

Ron sees this. "Hermione, what?" He sits up a bit, his eyes casting to hers in a deep concern. "Why are you crying?" He can think of a myriad of reasons why; but asking her this is a way to distract himself from thinking about them, from feeling their rawness burn him.

Hermione watches Ron back. "I don't know." Her head shakes sadly; she blinks another hot tear down.

It is a heartbreaking confession. It tears at all of them, holding them in the place that hurts.

It makes Ron hold to his position because he can't move from the pain of it all.

Harry holds Hermione tighter when that tear turns into quiet hitched sobbing. It's all he can manage, because his throat is closed up to choking.

He remembers trying to touch his mother's hand, his fingers closing on nothing but air. He remembers what it was like to tell his two best friends that he was going to _die, _seeing their faces, their hollowness, because they didn't want to let him go.

The two that are with him; who he can hear breathing.

When they look at each other again one of Ron's tears can't be stopped, winding down his face.

One of them sighs, nobody knows who it is, this little group of friends.

Minutes pass. Ron does not want to sleep, it's in his eyes. Hermione can see it. But she holds his tortured gaze, the one that doesn't want to see his brother in his dreams, only to wake up and remember that it wasn't real, that a constant in his life is now just a memory.

And she tells him: "It's okay Ron, sleep. It will be okay."

And Ron finally closes his eyes, under the lingering gaze of his friend, simply because she is _there. _

The aching heaviness that is surrounding them weighs on Hermione, it chokes her. She doesn't want to sleep either.

But Harry whispers: _"It's okay, it will be okay."_ into her ear, his breath is warm, his voice is sad, and her eyes find themselves closing to this, and to his warmth.

Harry listens to them breathing again, his two closet friends. Those long ago secrets aren't there yet, everything is too raw to go back to that. But the softness and torn sounds of their breathing, the screaming has muted under that sound. The sounds of them being there and alive is so loud it pulsates; it echoes, it _hurts._

And, he holds onto it.

And he knows they do too.

His eyes finally close.

He rejoins his friends.

It is three hours later when Molly comes up the stairs, softly checking each room, taking in her sleeping children, feeling the ache when she closes the door to Fred and George's old that room now only holds the sounds of silence because George couldn't bear to be in it when she offered it to him.

She leans over to sweep Ginny's fiery hair behind her ear. She kisses her, lingering her hand over her daughter before closing the door silently. She makes her way to the top of the winding towering staircase and pushes open Ron's bedroom door.

Ron is asleep on his bed, and so is Harry on his, and Molly can see the curled form of Hermione under Harry's arm in the lamplight flickering by Ron's bed. They are all facing towards each other, as if they couldn't bear to be separated even in their sleep.

Molly walks to each bed in turn, replacing Ron's arm underneath the covers, placing the fallen bit of blanket up over Harry's shoulder, tucking a stray errant of hair behind Hermione's hair the way she had done Ginny. She kisses them each on the brow as she does this, blowing out the lamplight before walking to the door.

She pauses at the opened doorway, peering back into the now inky blackness at the three of them.

"Goodnight my loves."

**xxxxxXxxxx**

**End.**

This started out as pure H/Hr, but I think they all went through something life altering together; and regardless of who ends up with whom, they all ultimately, always end up with each other.

R/R please.

Mystic


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